When I walked briskly with my 12 years old daughter into the arena of the Block 2 The Future Conference in Alameda California on April 4th, 2018, I had no idea that I will be walking out as a blockchain enthusiast. My daughter was chosen from her school to attend the conference and she insisted that I come along. My intentions were to get her there, do some sight seeing within the U.S Naval aircraft carrier and leave same day, but when I heard the founder of Presearch (decentralized search engine) speak about blockchain, decentralization, privacy and incentivization and how his project encompasses of all, I ended up staying the entire 3 nights with my daughter.
Prior to going to the conference, I have no idea of what blockchain is all about. I have heard about bitcoin at my job and saw one or two things about it on TV and that’s about it, but attending the Block 2 The Future Conference changed everything and I am now spending most part of my spare time at work and at home digging for information on blockchain technology and projects built on this modern technology.
On that beautiful late afternoon on April 4th, as I sat down among the audience listening to different project leads talk about their projects; few things stand out about the founder of Presearch project: His looks, demeanor and speech portrays that of a fighter who won’t give up easily in a fight. He seems a gentle man yet tough. I picked up the pamphlet in the back pocket of the sit in front of me and looked for the project to do a quick overview, what I saw made me transitioned from digging information from the pamphlet to using my cell phone to visit the website. My eyes almost popped out of their sockets when I learned from their website that this project is not only a working product but is also rewarding the users for using the platform.
At this point I wanted to talk to the founder so badly because I still can’t comprehend why users should be compensated for using the website to search and most importantly where is the reward or money coming from? I know Google makes billions of dollars from sponsoring ads and doesn’t pay its users and the question kept coming to my head – If Google can’t afford to pay me, why or how can Presearch afford to pay me to search?
Unfortunately, different reporters from various countries bombarded the Presearch founder after the speech and soon after he disappeared behind the curtains, but I was able to get hold of someone who claimed to have participated during the project’s crowd sale and have been following the project for about a year. He agreed to answer some of my questions and I gave him my words not to mention his name in this article
Question: Why do Presearch reward users?
Answer: Presearch is a community driven project and therefore its paramount for the project to share its revenue with its (community) users. You need to visit their Telegram channel and you will understand why community is so important to them. They have the most friendly community on Telegram.
Question: So where would the money be coming from?
Answer: Presearch does not pay physical cash to users. What it does is to reward users with the utility token (PRE) which is used within the Presearch ecosystem. Sponsors will need the utility token to be able to sponsor ads and when users come on the website to search and click on ads, or open ads videos etc, they will earn 0.25 PRE per click.
Question: When you said sponsors will need the utility token to be able to sponsor ads, you mean sponsors would need to be in possession of the token (PRE) to be able to place ads, where would they source the token from?
Answer: PRE token is available on exchanges; visit https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/presearch/ for the current value of each PRE. Sponsors would have to visit exchanges to buy PRE and head to www.presearch.org to sponsor ads. When users visit the website and click on such ads, or watch the videos, Presearch will reward such users with certain percentage of the total revenue generated for placing those ads/videos.
Question: So in order words, Presearch is sharing its revenue with the users?
Answer: Exactly!
Question: From what I see, its still directing users to other websites and its supposed to be a search engine!
Answer: Yes, you are correct, try and read the white paper. Their road map states that the project is divided into two phases. In phase one, it will act as a search tool by providing users with multiple search engines option from the front page and by mid-2019 it would have become a full search engine with its own index. The search engine will put into consideration users’ privacy and all searches will be decentralized; meaning your data won’t be stored by Presearch.
I went back home to continue my research on this amazing project and found out that there are other blockchain search engine projects like Brave, Bitclave and Nebulas. However, I found Presearch to be the best of these search engines for the following reasons: The project has a working product, the team includes members who have worked for IBM and other top tech companies and most importantly, Presearch is building a traditional search engine that will give Google a run for its name!
When I asked one of the admins in their Telegram channel the same question- why Presearch is paying its users? His response was, “Presearch is paying back to internet users what Google has stolen from them!” And I can’t agree less. Statistics shows that Google makes average of $58 million everyday from sponsors of advertisements. I will let you calculate what that will be in a year. And do you know how Google makes the money? They sell traffics – What that mean is, sponsors of advertisements pay Google based on the number of people who visit Google on daily bases. The idea is, the more people who visit Google to search, the more the chances of their advertisements getting noticed by potential consumers. Who are these consumers / visitors? It’s you and I. Google has been making money off us without us knowing. Should we care? Yes, we should care. Google is too big to fight individually, and that’s why we should all rally behind these blockchain technology projects who are sharing their earnings with the users who made the earnings possible.
Join Telegram here: https://t.me/presearch
Check out their Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PresearchCommunity/